First...Welcome to the Forums! Please feel free to join in and post. We welcome all newcomers. Since there's a lot of new people and everyone has questions, it would be good for you to understand what will and won't be helpful. You can learn a lot here to help yourself and others as you prepare to jump into this field, hopefully for the rest of your working career.

The idea of the forum is to help each other learn and move ahead because at some point we're going to be making important decisions ... and we'd rather have hundreds of equally good people we can rely on in case we have questions. Even in 30 years, we'll still have questions we can't answer. As you learn and move up, share. If you can help someone else, please do it. Don't just keep all that good information to yourself. We can all learn and grow from the knowledge of others and this is a great place to do it.

Please read through the following before making posts...

1. Feel free to make an introductory post mentioning anything you want.

2. If you have questions that you want to ask...
It's fine to ask a questions. It's expected - you're probably new to the field, you probably don't know a lot and you're trying to learn. However, before you post a question, look to see if your question has been recently asked by someone else. If it has, read it and see if that answers your question. People in the forum don't mind answering questions but they would like you to have at least looked around to see if it has been recently asked.

3. If you have specific questions...
Rather than placing specific questions in the Introductions and Greeting Forum, please try to find the specific forum (or topic area) that applies to your question and post your question there. That way, more people interested in that same topic will see it and respond. Others with the same question, either now or in the future, will also see it along with the responses.

4. There's threads at the tops of some of the forums - what are they?
Pay particular attention to some of these "sticky" threads. Those are the threads/postings at the top of each forum. This is valuable information and may answer a lot of your questions. Generally the information is there because it answers questions most people have had about a subject, and on occasion they'll get updated. For example, there is a sticky thread by Irish Blues that talks about classes to take in college to prepare for the actuarial field; if you have a question whether certain other classes would be OK to take, then ask. But if you ask "which classes should I take in college?" ... there's a thread that already answers that.

5. I have a question so I'll ask it multiple times to get attention.
Please don't. Making the same post in multiple times in multiple places thinking someone will be more likely to respond actually has the opposite affect. Many users who might normally respond to your post are more likely to ignore users who post the same exact question multiple times...it's bad forum etiquette.

6. Is there anything else I should know?
* Be respectful of others. This field is very close-knit in that there's not a lot of actuaries running around, so if someone is a bad apple the news will spread and your reputation will be a future problem.
* If you're here to spam, such as selling unrelated products or services, we'll find it very quickly and it will be deleted immediately. You'll also be banned from any further postings. So, please don't waste your time going through the whole registration process just to have your posts deleted.
* Don't incite people, be offfensive or even come close to insulting others. Be sensitve to the fact some people have some very strong beliefs and don't take issue with them. That's not what this forum is all about. Keep things "highly" professional.
* Don't be overtly negative about a specific company, product or service by name. If stating a specific company by name, mention the good without mentioning the bad.

That's it for right now - though I'm sure I'll add stuff in the future.

Good luck, everyone!

Many, many thanks to Irish Blues. He first posted most of this content and it has since been modified and added to.